In many computing environments, information may be passed from one device to another typically more powerful device to perform certain computing tasks, such as processing, storage, or communication. Such information may include processes, data, functions, or any other information that consumes computing resources. Information may be sent in packet form or in some other type of data stream in various applications. For example, a virtual machine (VM) may be segmented into a shell and core VM, and function calls to the shell VM may be passed to the core VM for processing. Segmented virtual machines are further described in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/378,061, entitled SEGMENTED VIRTUAL MACHINE filed Feb. 28, 2003 which is incorporated herein by reference for all purposes.
FIG. 1 is a block diagram illustrating a system including a segmented VM. In this example, VM functionality is segmented into shell VM 108 and core VM 112. Shell VM 108 performs interactions with the external environment, such as with external application 104. Core VM 112 performs VM internal execution functions. External interactions may be passed from external application 104 through shell VM 108 to core VM 112 for processing. For example, file or network I/O, operating system calls, and other native library interactions may be passed to core VM 112. In J2EE and Java server environments, many of these forwarded interactions may be TCP/IP connection packets (to/from web tier, DB tiers, clustering traffic, etc.). There is a certain amount of load associated with forwarding these interactions through shell VM 108. If this load is large enough, shell VM 108 may bottleneck the segmented VM's performance, and much of core VM 112's computing capability may be wasted. Thus, it would be desirable to reduce the load associated with forwarding certain types of interactions through the shell VM.